How To Craft A Compelling Offer In 7 Easy Steps

What Is An Offer?

An offer is the final place where you tell your potential customers what you are offering them in exchange for their money. It might be a sales page, or a sales video or a pitch on stage at an event or on a live webinar. Whatever the format, the content remains much the same and there are some key points you should cover to help increase your likelihood of making a sale.

I previously became very confused about what exactly an offer is. I thought it was just the buy button on a sales page or simply saying you get this if you give me X amount of dollars. I later learned that an offer is a lot more than that. It includes the obvious component – a price and a mechanism to make the transaction – but it also includes other important things like price justification, risk reversal, background story and other marketing elements.

The offer is absolutely critical because it’s the final piece of marketing your prospect experiences before making a purchase. You might lead them towards an offer with all kinds of different marketing tools, but the offer is the final conclusion.

7 Steps To Craft A Good Offer

These ideas were derived from some materials I studied from Eben Pagan, Rich Schefren, Jeff Walker, Frank Kern and many other internet and direct response marketers. These guys didn’t come up with these concepts of course, guys like John Carlton, Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy, among many others who have come before them, also teach these core concepts, which have proven effective for countless marketing campaigns.

In the spirit of interpretation, here is my take on the 7 steps, which you can use to craft an offer for your next product.

1. The headline.

This is the element that encapsulates what your product does in a brief sentence or two. It should focus on the core emotion driving your potential customer to make the purchase, and must be clear about specific outcomes. Like writing headlines for blog posts, this is the most important element because it’s the initial attention grabber. For a video offer, I consider what you say in the first 30 seconds equivalent to the headline, or you can include headline text above the video to entice people to click the play button.

2. Set up the scenario and explain the challenge the customer is up against.

In this section you frame what the potential customer is facing and what experiences most people have when trying to achieve whatever your product helps them achieve. This is where you demonstrate you know the problem or desire the potential customer has better than they do. This is very powerful because it shows your intimate knowledge of the situation and that infers you might have something that actually works, because you know so much about what doesn’t.

3. Tell your story.

I’ve relied heavily on this element in many of my offers when it comes to teaching how to make money online with blogs and membership sites. If you’re teaching how to do something or how you went through an experience to come up with your product, going through the before and after story is very powerful. It helps to hook the prospect in because stories are the most compelling content you can create. As you tell the story you should point out your ah-ha moments and how you came up with certain techniques or solutions that no one else uses.

If you don’t have your own story, or even if you do, telling the story of other people works well too. Adding some case studies of previous customers or people who have benefited from your work is a very good idea and another technique I’ve used many times before. Testimonials are good, but stories from other people who were just like everyone else with a problem that you helped them solve with your product, are much better.

4. Dish out a list of the benefits of your product using specific and tangible results.

Eben suggest you come up with twenty dot points you list out of all the amazing things your product or service does, focusing on tangible outcomes and specific problems (avoid abstract concepts like “you will feel better” – instead use phrases like “You will lose ten pounds and be able to play tennis again”). This is a good chance to touch upon sticking points that your prospects might have. If your prospect sees just one point that strikes a nerve that they simply must know about, this could be the trigger that convinces them to buy.

5. Next you state the price, but you don’t just lay it out there, you justify it by demonstrating how much incredible value you are delivering.

Eben recommends you focus on showing how you are charging just 10% of the value you are delivering, for example pointing out that you charge X dollars for private coaching, yet this product costs just a fraction of that. This is a good time to include bonuses, which as Frank Kern calls it – you “stack the cool” – including so many relevant and exceptionally valuable additions to your core product that people can’t help but say yes.

6. The Risk Reversal.

This is where you tell prospects that there is no risk buying because they are protected by a guarantee. The risk is then placed on you to deliver, since they can ask for their money back if they don’t like it. Of course you plan to over-deliver, so this is a win-win, your prospects are protected so compelled to buy, and you are committed to delivering a great product.

7. The Call To Action.

This is straight forward, yet needs to be very specific. Tell your prospects to buy by saying do this (e.g. click the buy button), then this will happen (e.g. you will be directed to our secure order form where you will make payment via credit card or paypal) and then this (e.g. you will receive a confirmation email within a few minutes of processing your order).

Don’t just say “please buy now”, tell them how to do it and say do it now. This needs to be explained as if you are teaching someone how to use the computer for the first time.

Obviously these points can each be dissected to much more depth, but this list is a good starting point. I recommend if you want more details on what to include in a sales page but you don’t have money to invest in a full course on copywriting, try Alexis Dawes Desperate Buyers Only ebook, which you can find my review of here and costs under $100.

21 Comments

Yaro — very nice summary. One thing that I would add is a need to focus on the customer — both in terms of their pain and how your story relates to them. To many sales letters that I see today focus on product features (as opposed to benefits) and fail to show how the benefits of the product will SOLVE THE PROBLEM (whatever it is).

Hi Yaro – great reminder how important it can be to have a structure to work to – I know I can spend days and days working on something and feel like I am going in circles, but with a clear structure I can whip out stuff in an hour.
Thanks for that (and also to Eben of course )

I am local to NYC and am anxious to see your offer. The thing that would make the offer compelling for me would be the ability to work with you to create and market a product to sell on my blog. This would include a compelling lead free generation offer and designing an end to end process to market and sell it. Having your feedback, an interview, a testimonial, etc would be make it irresistible. I hope to work with you in October.

I never really thought about it this way, it’s the sort of thing I’ve always done but it is good to see things broken down into more obvious steps.To be honest, reading this article makes me realise that I have always neglected steps two and seven to a certain extent. Talking about myself has never been a strong point but I must try to put this aspect of my sales pitch over. A stronger call to action would help as well. Great article !!

This is a great summary on how to create a powerful sales message. I especially like the “tell your own story” part a lot. I also would add some testimonials from customers who already bought the product throughout the sales letter.

Yaro, thank you for giving it away in this post. Question: concerning the story, how deep is too deep here? I assume that the best offer pages use real estate surgically, making sure not to pledge too much space to #6 and too little, for instance, to #2. That said, the story seems to me to be an area where one could slam the user with information not of particular interest to the user or the offer. My experience has been that, given the chance, my customers (and I) often get to talking about ourselves, our stuff, et al and in no time at all, the lights no longer shining on the offer/problem. Do you have any specific thoughts on how best to be concise on the story portion of the offer inasmuch as in the end it being one that limits what the user would want to know most in a case or testimonial? Thank you again for another terrific read.

Great post, and all 7 points are necessary, but I really like what you covered on the 5th point, too many people just put a price with no justification. When you justify your price, you can often times tell if you are over or under charging, it’s amazing how many people under charge for their services.

Very good post for Web Workers, included it in this weeks Top 5 posts at my blog

On my Home Business Lifestyle Blog I created an Offer (for a ‘Getting Traffic’ product) and in this offer I did already had the ‘Stack the Cool’ going on, or atleast I did already stack some cool. (a tiny little eBook and an Free Report that’s interesting for people that want more traffic to their site(s))

Only since I was communicating it as a Monthly Offer, it didn’t really directly explain what the actual offer itself was. Making it a little to complicated and probably catching attention for to many things at once that way ‘taking the wind’ out of the headline a little that way.

So with a few of your points in mind I did had a second look at my
offer and made some improvements, I still think
it could use a lot more polishing….,

Anyway,

This afternoon I already made a few changes based on the things
you wrote in this post, so hopefully I can write you a new comment soon
with a ‘Before and After’-story

Hi Yaro,
Do you still make offers that are just a (long) sales page, or are most of your offers now all created with video? Do you find it’s easier to ‘talk it out’ in front of the camera rather than craft a sales letter? Thanks Martin

Great post, as always, Yaro – but I think Eben has it wrong (with all due respect!)

His 7 steps to craft a good offer are actually the 7 steps to PROMOTE an offer. The headline, story, call-to-action, etc. all are components of the sales process.

In my online business I research gaps in markets and produce info products to fill those gaps. In my opinion, an offer is simply this: a bundle of benefits.

When a consumer buys a product, they aren’t buying the headline, or the story, or any of that – they’re buying the group of benefits that the product represents. in the case of your blogging mastermind course, people aren’t buying how to set up video on their blog, or how to write compelling copy. They’re buying the end-goal benefit that your course may provide: control over one’s life.

As Maslow said, all human beings are subject to a hierarchy of needs. An offer has to possess benefits that fulfill those needs.

You have a point Moe, though it sounds like you are taking a step further back to perhaps saying you have a “niche” – a need in the market, which the offer is then presented to make a transaction viable.

Great Post, I think we should pay a little more attention to the Headline and the Call to Action.

The Headline is really important because it is what makes the reader “consume” all the information in the offer or simply leave the website. We should really try to make a headline that challenges all paradigms and beliefs that the reader has and also present a lot of benefits.

The call to action is also very important because its what makes the reader or prospect go ahead and buy the product or service

I have been reviewing your website for a month now and am just now beginning to utilize some of your advice in my newest website. My previous endeavors did not allow for much monetization due to the niche being very small and not containing opportunities to sell existing products.

I am looking forward to more great info from you that I can make good use of on my upcoming projects. Thanks for all your efforts.

While I cannot disagree with anything you have shared here, one caveat comes to mind. Doesn’t a product category also define a workable niche? In other words when a product category is broken down to its simplest elements are you not defining a niche or audience based on common likes and or dislikes of that product category? And the demographics of these people sharing interest in these products defines the audience.

I am way new at this so maybe my thinking is backward, but right now it makes perfect sence to me.

I seen this in so many offers. Never really understood it still now.
You show us well how to promote this compelling offer.
I cam here because I typed in google keyword phrase
How to create a compelling offer.
Thank you so much for sharing